How to support your content marketing with little widgets on blog

Are you leaving out anything of your content marketing that could be getting you more results?

Are you aware that some widgets directly support your SEO efforts while others provide a positive supporting role?

Almost all blogs have some features to improve either their SEO or their conversion. This includes share buttons, , related posts, search bars, and other mechanics of your blog.

These mechanisms which are implemented by what are called widgets, provide either direct benefits to your SEO or they play a supporting role in improving your SEO.

Bear in mind what content marketing is, which is the activities of creating content that attracts, engages and educates your audience and to some extent entertains them. So when the day comes that they need what you sell, they’ll think of you first.

The following are some of the widgets which improve the SEO of your blog

The following widgets provide DIRECT SEO benefits

Related posts

All of the widgets that display post titles on the webpage provide a similar SEO benefit. While you’ll hear a lot about the importance of keywords, you do NOT want to keyword stuff your blog posts. You do however want to keyword stuff your blog post titles.

Now it’s important to understand the distinction between the blog post and the web page.

The blog post is the content you’ve published. The webpage is the blog post plus everything else that appears on the webpage. The everything else is displayed by the various widgets you configure for your blog pages.

Assuming you are properly keyword stuffing your titles, by displaying the titles of related posts along with every post increases the appearance of keywords in your web pages, which is what Google indexes. Every time Google indexes one of your web pages, it indexes the full page, with all the text from all the widgets.

So while the related posts widget does provide your visitors ideas about other articles to read, from an SEO perspective it provides Google with more instances of your main keywords appearing on the page.

Most popular posts

This helps your first-time visitors who might be looking for where to start from in your blog. It provides a similar SEO benefit as the related posts widget does.

Recent posts widget

This widget makes it easy for your visitors to find out what’s new and it provides a similar SEO benefit as the related posts and most popular posts widgets.

Comments

Turn on comments on your blog as they are one of the core functionalities that make a blog a blog.

Worried about spam comment? Use plugins like Akismet to handle the deluge.

Google “likes” web sites and web pages that are updated more often. When you publish a blog post that is an update to your website. When someone comments on one of your blog posts that is another update. When you respond to that comment that is yet another update. If you asked a question in your comment and someone responds to it, that is yet another comment.

The “nirvana” of an SEO boost from comments is when the comments section of a blog post resembles a discussion such as you might find on a social media site.

The search box makes it easier for people to find stuff on your website. This makes the website easier to use and provides a benefit to your visitors. Assuming you’re publishing quality content (and please do) it helps keep people on your site longer, which provide some SEO benefit.

The following widgets provide conversion (lead generation) benefits

Calls to action

A website without effective calls to action may attract traffic, but won’t generate leads. This is fine when you’re selling advertising, but not good when you’re selling your products and/or services.